ukes was as ready a man as any half-dozen young mates that may be
caught by casting a net upon the waters; and though he had been somewhat
taken aback by the startling viciousness of the first squall, he had
pulled himself together on the instant, had called out the hands and had
rushed them along to secure such openings about the deck as had not been
already battened down earlier in the evening. Shouting in his fresh, stentorian voice, "Jump, boys, and bear a hand!" he led in the work, telling himself the while that he had "just expected this."
But at the same time he was growing aware that this was rather more than
he had expected. From the first stir of the air felt on his cheek the
gale seemed to take upon itself the accumulated impetus of an avalanche. Heavy sprays enveloped the Nan-Shan from stem to stern, and instantly in the midst of her regular rolling she began to jerk and plunge as though she had gone mad with fright.
Jukes thought, "This is no joke." While he was exchanging explanatory
yells with his captain, a sudden lowering of the darkness came upon the
night, falling before their vision like something palpable. It was as
if the masked lights of the world had been turned down. Jukes was
uncritically glad to have his captain at hand. It relieved him as though
that man had, by simply coming on deck, taken most of the gale's weight
upon his shoulders. Such is the prestige, the privilege, and the burden
of command.
Captain MacWhirr could expect no relief of that sort from any one on
earth. Such is the loneliness of command. He was trying to see, with
that watchful manner of a seaman who stares into the wind's eye as if
into the eye of an adversary, to penetrate the hidden intention and
guess the aim and force of the thrust. The strong wind swept at him out
of a vast obscurity; he felt under his feet the uneasiness of his ship, and he could not even discern the shadow of her shape. He wished it were not so; and very still he waited, feeling stricken by a blind man's helplessness.
To be silent was natural to him, dark or shine. Jukes, at his elbow, made himself heard yelling cheerily in the gusts, "We must have got the worst of it at once, sir." A faint burst of lightning quivered all round, as if flashed into a cavern--into a black and secret chamber of the sea, with a floor of foaming crests.
It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of clouds
hanging low, the lurch of the long outlines of the ship, the black
figures of men caught on the bridge, heads forward, as if petrified in
the act of butting. The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then
the real thing came at last.
It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of
a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an
overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam
had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each
other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one
from one's kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man
incidentally, as it were--without passion. A furious gale attacks him
like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
Jukes was driven away from his commander. He fancied himself whirled a
great distance through the air. Everything disappeared--even, for
a moment, his power of thinking; but his hand had found one of
the rail-stanchions. His distress was by no means alleviated by an
inclination to disbelieve the reality of this experience. Though young, he had seen some bad weather, and had never doubted his ability to imagine the worst; but this was so much beyond his powers of fancy that it appeared incompatible with the existence of any ship whatever. He would have been incredulous about himself in the same way, perhaps, had he not been so harassed by the necessity of exerting a wrestling effort against a force trying to tear him away from his hold. Moreover, the conviction of not being utterly destroyed returned to him through the sensations of being half-drowned, bestially shaken, and partly choked.